Most importantly, he had to decide how to handle the girl. Having never encountered someone quite like Sinead, he found himself in a difficult position. The appropriate strategy was not obvious. Young women had never interested him much, either sexually or platonically. Even in his twenties, he’d found women his own age to be flighty, superficial, loud and frankly boring. Older women tended to be grateful for the attention and easier to control, but even they could prove to be unmanageable. A lonely widow or desperate divorcee was tolerable for the occasional short-term arrangement, but his wife was the only one he could abide for any significant length of time.
He dipped the fishing rod into the lake and sat down. A roach or even a minnow should have been an achievable goal, but there’d been not so much as a bite in three hours. He would have to try a different spot tomorrow. Reclining into the fold-out chair, his broad back stretching out the canvas, he gently brushed yellow blossom from his linen trousers. The sun was emerging from behind the grand oak on the opposite bank. Readjusting the handle in the rod rest next to the chair, he sniffed the crisp spring air and admired the distinctly English rural scene. He chuckled at the thought of Sinead imagining him in Bangkok. Perhaps one day he would travel to the Far East, if he could ever raise the funds to do so. He pulled the blue bucket hat down over his ears. Then again, the weather out there was probably unsuitable for his fair complexion.
He reached into a coat pocket for his BlackBerry and found the pictures of Sinead’s friends at their house party. She’d been out of the bungalow for two hours on Saturday afternoon, allowing him ample time to study the Facebook account she’d carelessly left open on her laptop and to download some photo albums onto a memory stick. Unfortunately, the timeline yielded few insights. Sinead hadn’t posted regular status updates for a few months and she rarely commented on anyone else’s. It was another thing they had in common. They were both outsiders: the watchers, forever lurking in the background, while the beautiful people were busy living their beautiful lives.
He scrolled through the images, ruminating on what Sinead had said about each of her former housemates. The photos were quite dulclass="underline" Heidi, Magz and Imogen were tiresome, drunken girls posing coquettishly for the camera. Pulling faces, pouting and preening. He’d seen hundreds, if not thousands of such photos on various social media accounts: the so-called selfie generation. They don’t know they’re born.
An image of a cockily-handsome youth swiped onto the screen, and his finger hovered over the BlackBerry. The photo was tagged with a name: Joel Thornton-Barnes. He reached over the side of the chair and removed a soggy cheese and tomato sandwich from a Tupperware container on the ground. As he raised it to his mouth, he returned his attention to Joel’s photo. Slowly he chewed the sandwich and contemplated the youth, unaware of a tomato slice slipping out and landing on his shirt.
***
At half past four he decided to call it a day. He packed up the tackle, collapsed his folding chair and left his patch on the riverbank as clean as he’d found it. Walking back to his car, he considered a couple of places further downriver that might yield more of a return. The only issue was other anglers with the same idea – the whole point of this trip was being alone to think things through.
Driving back through the Hertfordshire countryside, down the narrow tree-lined winding lanes, he came up with excuses for why he wouldn’t be visiting his wife. She was living nearby, about twenty miles away, but he couldn’t face seeing her. The last time had been three months ago. She had refused to speak to him then; in fact, she had barely acknowledged his presence. It had left him feeling thoroughly depressed. Worse than that, he’d felt powerless – and that was one emotion he simply could not stomach. The very next night he’d picked up Vincent and had resumed his youthful pastime.
The country lane suddenly darkened. He looked through the windscreen at the trees full of blossom lined up on either side of the road, their overhanging upper branches forming a canopy high above and blocking out the blue sky; it was as though he was driving through a tunnel.
No, he would not be visiting his wife. Not today, or next week, or next month. Never again. He didn’t need to make up excuses any more. He wasn’t too busy, he didn’t have the flu, his car didn’t need to be serviced. His marriage was a chapter of his life that belonged in the past. Their marriage of convenience had, frankly, become thoroughly inconvenient. It had also been financially disastrous: selling their flat to pay the exorbitant residential home fees had been the only viable option. All he had to show for his years of matrimony were the car he was driving and the lock-up garage. Still – onwards and upwards.
Fishing wouldn’t sustain him all week and besides rain was forecast for tomorrow. He needed a project: a mission. His mind kept wandering back to Sinead. Why did he find that girl so intriguing? If he believed in God he might have assumed she’d been brought to his door for a reason after their initial meeting on Tottenham Court Road last year. But he didn’t believe in God. Nevertheless, something told him it was no mere coincidence; Sinead’s unexpected arrival on the scene held significance. A strong connection existed between them; he felt it every time he was in her presence.
The only other person with whom he’d felt such an affinity had been a boy he’d known for two terms at boarding school. He tried recalling those days, but childhood memories were always hard to access. Then the name popped into his mind: Gifford – David Gifford. This boy was a pal of some description, but it was so long ago; decades since he’d even thought about him. Perhaps he could find some value in dredging up those memories. By concentrating on the road ahead, fragments would inevitably start to appear in his mind. For the next few minutes, he drove at a steady 30 mph and emptied his conscious mind.
It was during his first year at boarding school, so he must have been about eight and a half. He remembered envying Gifford’s A-Team pencil case during a history lesson. Gifford was in the same house, but at first they hadn’t spoken to each other. At some point there’d been a game of conkers.
The fragments of memory were coalescing now…
They became acquainted when Gifford challenged him to a game of conkers and had forfeited the pencil case when he lost five games in a row. After the conkers match they got on famously, bonding over a shared love of comics: The Beano and Whizzer and Chips at first, and then the more sophisticated Judge Dredd in 2000 AD.
Together they came up with their own comic strip; he provided the speech bubbles and Gifford, being good at art, did the panels. He couldn’t remember the premise, but the plot was inspired by a James Bond film and featured a wisecracking robot, because Gifford liked drawing robots. Crude, juvenile stuff, but it passed the endless hours of free time in the evenings and weekends.
And then Gifford had never returned for the summer term; his father had moved the family to America. Or that was the rumour anyway; he’d never been told anything directly. A few months after that, someone from the year above stole his prized comic book collection and burned it on Bonfire Night. So that was the end of that. His free time was soon filled up, though, when Mr Henderson took an interest and began giving him ‘extra special tuition’; a wearisome euphemism which Henderson delighted in repeating each time he locked the office door and unzipped his nylon trousers. Many years later, he resolved to look up his old housemaster, but pancreatic cancer had claimed old ‘Horny’ Henderson before he could pay him a visit.